Jay Ashton is Canada's Restaurant Guy and the founder of Ashton Media, one of the country's most-followed voices in foodservice and hospitality.
On June 30th, I will walk out of Sysco for the last time.
I have been thinking about how to write that sentence for a while now, and I keep coming back to the same problem: it does not feel like the ending it looks like on paper. Twenty-two years. Half my life spent inside one of the most trusted foodservice companies in North America, and now a date circled on a calendar that is supposed to represent closing time. Retirement. The finish line.
Except I am not done. Not even close.
It did not start with a career plan. It started with a phone call on a highway, a baby on the way, and a company I already trusted before I ever wore the name on my shirt. Before I ever worked for Sysco, I was a Sysco customer. I was operating a restaurant in Red Deer, Alberta, and I had competitors approaching me constantly trying to earn my business. But there was something different about the way Sysco showed up. They were not just delivering products. They were genuinely invested in my success as an operator. When the time came to transition out of the restaurant business, I was driving south toward Calgary to finalize a deal when my phone rang with a job offer. I did not fully understand the scope of the company beyond my own experience as a customer. But that experience had been more than enough to tell me this was a company worth being a part of.
What followed was twenty-two years of building things that had never been built before.
I started in sales out of Stettler, Alberta. From the beginning, I could see the gap between what we were offering and what our customers actually needed. They did not need a sales representative with a product catalogue. They needed real support, help with menus, food costing, marketing their businesses, physical signage at their locations. So I started providing it, long before Sysco had a formal name for it. I was consulting before we ever called it consulting. I conducted the very first Business Review in Canada, with a customer called Bill's Catering, and I recognized immediately that the model held something much bigger than a single conversation.
In Calgary, I took that idea and built it into STIR, working alongside Chris and Cam. We developed more than 100 session offerings designed around what operators actually needed to solve. At our busiest, we were running four sessions a day, and customers were walking out with completed LTO menus they could put on a table that same week. Operating companies from across the country started flying their teams to Calgary to see what we had built. Competitors were talking about what was happening inside our walls. A small idea from a prairie town had become a national conversation.
Randy White invited me to Toronto to present STIR to all of Sysco's Presidents and Directors. I stood in front of the entire national leadership team and made the case that we needed to stop focusing on what we had not sold to a customer and start dedicating ourselves to strengthening their businesses. The one-year test that followed became a permanent move to Corporate. We integrated vendor partners into the model, built the first vendor debiting program in the company, opened a healthcare vertical, launched Webinar Wednesdays as a national weekly series, restructured how we engaged with more than 20 industry associations across Canada, and grew from consulting with a handful of accounts to more than 6,000 customer locations annually, supported by a team of 80 professionals across 16 culinary kitchens coast to coast.
At the height we were consulting with Sysco in the United States, providing guidance to Sysco Ireland, and laying the groundwork to support Brakes in the United Kingdom. A kid from Saskatchewan who started running a restaurant in Red Deer was now helping shape how one of the largest foodservice companies in the world goes to market internationally.
Then COVID arrived and dismantled all of it overnight.
What came next, I did not plan. I had spent years building a digital communication infrastructure inside Sysco, and when the industry went into lockdown, we were positioned to respond. We started producing Facebook Live broadcasts out of my garage during a Canadian winter, with no playbook and no certainty that anyone would watch. We did it because our customers and our industry needed someone to show up for them. That effort became the SVK Network, three full years of weekly content featuring restaurant operators, executive chefs, and industry thought leaders from across North America. We hosted Bo Jackson. We produced two large-scale Live Aid-style concert events for the hospitality industry, uniting restaurants and Canadian music legends including Tom Cochrane. We collaborated with Uber Eats to power the Takeout Wednesday movement that drove consumer traffic back to the restaurants that needed it most. We reached millions of viewers and built, in every practical sense, a media company operating inside Sysco.
When the pandemic receded, we evolved the live format into a podcast. When that chapter closed, I returned to the Prairies in 2023 with a simple directive from our president: go build something. So I built Sysco Max, a shift from consulting to ongoing coaching, working with operators not in isolated sessions but through sustained partnership focused on their growth. And then, in February of last year, we launched the Ultimate Hospitality Business Summits: full-day intensive bootcamps for hospitality operators built on every relationship I had cultivated across two decades. Calgary. Winnipeg. Regina. Saskatoon. Edmonton. Canmore. Full rooms. Real impact.
I gave this company and this industry everything I had. And I am genuinely proud of every bit of it.
But here is the thing about twenty-two years of building: you get very good at seeing what does not exist yet.
What I see is this. Canadian foodservice and hospitality does not have the media infrastructure it deserves. The operators, chefs, suppliers, and leaders who make this industry run every day have been underserved by B2B media that is either too expensive, too thin, or too disconnected from the actual realities of running a business in this country. The big national brands have always had a path to reach their audience. The independent operator in a small prairie town, the emerging supplier trying to connect with the right buyer, the regional brand with something real to offer but not a national chain's budget, those people have mostly been left out. That is the gap I have been building toward closing for years. And on July 1st, I get to do it full time.
Ashton Media is what comes next. A fully integrated media ecosystem built to reach more than 900,000 foodservice and hospitality decision-makers every month across Canada and the US. The Late Night Restaurant Podcast is already ranked number one in Canada, number four in the United States, and number 32 worldwide for restaurants. We have interviewed more than 1,650 industry leaders across 15 countries and we’ve worked with many top brands across Canada. That is what we have built while I was still doing this on the side.
What comes next, with full attention behind it, is a different conversation entirely.
In 2027, Ashton Media is launching three national summits: the Foodservice and Hospitality Leadership Summit, the Foodservice and Hospitality Marketing Summit, and Canada's only Foodservice Tech Summit. NEED Magazine, Canada's first publication built specifically for foodservice operators, launches this fall. The Alberta Restaurant Hall of Fame Awards, Alberta's first-ever night dedicated to honouring the operators, chefs, and builders who shaped this province's restaurant industry, is coming in 2027.
I started this journey as a restaurant operator in Red Deer who got a phone call on a highway. I spent twenty-two years helping build Sysco into one of the most trusted foodservice brands in North America. Now I am walking out the door on June 30th and building something that does not exist yet.
Not bad for a kid from Saskatchewan.
If you are a brand, a supplier, a technology company, or an association that wants to be part of what is coming, reach out to Sal and he will walk you through what a partnership looks like. The van is loaded. The mics are ready. The roads are calling.
Sal: [email protected]
And I am just getting started.
